Refusals,Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale

Abstract

In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits re-turns to data. These re-turns draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of re-turn is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through feeling with blackness. We offer Crawley’s theory of sonic epistemologies as a way to think and feel blackness, that is, to create otherwise worlds/knowledges/subjects. We argue that tuning into the sonic—or feeling with blackness—can help literacy educators thinking with affect to sense and develop nonhumanist ways of knowing/being/doing literacy, while simultaneously acknowledging the potential dangers of reinscribing whiteness. We propose that retheorizing affect in relation to blackness is necessary for literacy education, research, and ultimately, collective healing and justice.

Unruly edges: Toddler literacies of the Capitalocene

“…Along with decolonial scholars of childhood, Black philosophy and feminist scholarship are important voices in relation to the question of how to imagine literacies outside of the framing of whiteness and human exceptionalism. Thiel and Dernikos (2020) draw on Crawley's work to emphasise the importance of movement, breath and the body. Quashie (2021) similarly theorises alternative forms of world making via his notion of Black Aliveness, foregrounding 'capacities of knowing' (Lorde, cited in Quashie, 2021: 17) located in the body and in sensation.…”

“…In a context in which children of colour are positioned as ‘less than’ and measured against framings and categories that centre whiteness, it is necessary ‘to create otherwise worlds’ (Thiel and Dernikos, 2020: 482). In their analysis of how ‘white affect’ can act as a pathologising backdrop to young children’s meaning making, Thiel and Dernikos ask,“How might we learn to think and feel differently about such liveliness once we consider the myriad ways some children’s “animated” bodies become racialized, gendered, classed, and so on within educational and community spaces?” (2020: 483).…”

“…For Haraway (2016: 30) two ‘old saws of Western philosophy’, human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, sit at the heart of the problematic of conceptualising the current planetary crisis beyond anthropocentric and phallocentric narratives of what it means to be human. Thus, the core arguments of the Capitalocene add in important ways (as this paper will elucidate) to critical considerations of literacies, language and time as progress within early childhood, by creating new conceptual bridges between scholarship calling for human/planetary interdependency to be placed at the heart of early childhood education (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020; Dernikos and Thiel, 2019; Duhn, 2012; Myrstad et al, 2020; Somerville and Murris, forthcoming) and key arguments around how narrowing, hierarchical approaches to what ‘counts’ as a literate and speaking child are colonial, racist, and privilege whiteness and cultures of the industrialised west (Avineri et al, 2015; Tarc, 2015; Thiel and Dernikos, 2020; Wynter Hoyte and Smith, 2020).…”

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

“…Nordstrom et al (2021), for example, document the role of joy as children create multimodal compositions while Boldt (2021) explores the 'vitality 'and 'aliveness' of classroom life. Developing these ideas, a small number of posthumanist studies invite us to consider relationships between children, the things around them and the meanings they make (Thiel and Dernikos, 2020;Kuby and Gutshall Rucker, 2020). Rather than focusing on planned activity, such work explores literacy as emergent and much of this work draws on examinations of what unfolds in the moment.…”

“…The majority of studies in this group draw on ethnographic approaches, with some use of post qualitative methods designed to challenge habitual ways of observing classroom activity with a view to sensitising themselves to aspects of classroom life they may not notice otherwise. Baroutsis (2021) for example used time lapse photography to look afresh at classroom activity moment-to-moment rather than examining it in relation only to teachers' intentions, Jokinen and Murris (2020) examined images of hands from video stills of a literacy lesson, while Thiel and Dernikos (2020) revisited data on classroom composing with a focus on sound to enable them to 'feel' their data.…”